Download today’s Dollop in its audio form here
The vast majority of these Dollops have been written with me sitting on my bed in my house in Sheffield. Tomorrow’s Dollop will be written in the car on the way to Heathrow Airport, and then … Who knows what will happen after that. I will be in Australia with my folk group The Young’uns for nearly a month.
The majority of people access these Dollops in their audio form, and I think it is going to be the audio aspect of the Dollops that will pose the greatest challenge. For a start, there is the issue of finding somewhere to record the audio. Tomorrow for instance, I will be in a car, at an airport and then on a plane. There are no other locations that I will be tomorrow other than those three, unless something has gone awry, in which case the Digital Dollop will be the least of my concerns, while I am stranded in the middle of an ocean amongst the wreckage. Although, if I somehow manage to pull off a Dollop from the middle of an ocean then that would be incredible, and would get me great publicity.
Not only would I have to record the Dollop whilst treading water or clinging on to a bit of plane, but then I’d also have to somehow utilise my laptop in order to edit and upload the audio. Actually, I think I could probably get away with not editing the audio on this occasion. I don’t think anyone is going to think, “well, I’m impressed that he’s managed to still do a Dollop after an emergency exit into the middle of an ocean, but his editing skills are rather under par, in fact, I’d go so far as to say he’s not done any editing at all. There are loads of mistakes in this, especially those bits when he gets water in his mouth, which ideally would have been edited out, as they’re completely unfathomable.”
I’ve no idea how I’d manage to read my Braille display whilst treading water. I’d have to rest my laptop and Braille display on top of some plane debris, or maybe Sean would volunteer his head, after all, it’s a very noble cause. Although, I think that if the plane did crash land in an ocean, and I somehow managed to survive the crash and keep my recording equipment in tact, then I don’t think I’d actually be bothering to read the Dollop that I had written an hour or so before this whole episode occurred. I think it’s safe to say I’d probably go off script for that day’s Dollop. It’s not as if I’m going to start the recording as normal: “David’s Daily Digital Dollop, Dollop 68 … oh, if you’re wondering what that noise is, our plane has crashed into the Indian Ocean, but that hadn’t happened when I wrote this Dollop, so we won’t be talking about that today. Must stick to the script, ever the professional. I’ll tell you about that tomorrow when I’ve properly written it up on my laptop, but right now, here’s today’s Dollop all about a rather amusing conversation I had with one of the airline stewards.”
Even if I somehow did manage to record that day’s Dollop from the ocean, I would still then need to upload it to the Internet, and I bet the Indian Ocean has really crap WIFI. And these are the kinds of problems I am no doubt going to face whilst in Australia, because not only do I need to find the time and space to write the Dollop, but then I need to find somewhere to read the Dollop out for the audio version, edit out all my mistakes because my Braille reading is terrible, and then find somewhere that has WIFI. I can’t use my mobile phone internet connection because I’m in Australia and that would cost hundreds of pounds, plus I can’t upload the podcast over a 3G or 4G connection, due to the way my web servers are setup.
I was thinking of writing and recording some emergency Dollops tonight, that I could schedule to publish in case I don’t manage to release one, but that would require me doing them tonight, and I still need to pack, so that’s not going to happen, plus I like the idea of the uncertainty aspect.
I should have no issue uploading the written version of tomorrow’s Dollop from the airport, as I could use my mobile Internet connection if necessary, but I will need WIFI in order to upload the audio. So, this is a warning to Dollop listeners that tomorrow could well be the first day I fail to get the audio Dollop released.
I know that the original premise of this challenge was to release a daily blog post for everyday of this year, and currently that challenge still stands, however I think that even if I logistically can’t do that, I will still write a Dollop everyday, and I might just have to release them retrospectively. But we shall see how it all pans out.
Until tomorrow … hopefully.
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